Human childrearing is characterized by cooperative care and grandmothers are usually the most prominent alloparents. Nevertheless, it has been argued that limited resources may intensify competition among kin. The effect of grandmothers’ presence on child survival may thus crucially depend on the family’s socioeconomic status. We evaluate the impact of grandmothers’ presence on child survival using a large historical dataset from eighteenth to nineteenth-century western Bohemia (N = 6880) and assess the effects of socioeconomic status. We employed a varying effects model conditioned on relatedness between individuals because of possible genetically transmitted benefits. Proportional hazards showed that grandmothers had little or no impact on child survival in families of high and medium socioeconomic status (farmers and cottagers, respectively), whereas in families with the lowest socioeconomic status (lodgers), grandmothers’ presence increased the survival probability of children up to five years of age. The beneficial effect of grandmaternal care was strongest between the first and second years of life. Importantly, though, in families with low socioeconomic status, we also observed lower survival chances of children when both grandmothers lived in the same village. These findings suggest that the balance between kin cooperation in childrearing and competition over resources may depend on resource availability.
This article discusses the position of widowed rural women in early 19th-century Bohemia. It focuses on women who had been married to full peasant farmers, holders of smaller farmsteads or cottagers. The data collected are based on the method of family reconstruction, which made it possible to carry out an in-depth examination of the background of individual widows as well as of the factors which influenced the widows' future. Results show that in deciding whether to remarry, widows were not determined only by economic or demographic circumstances (their age). Rather, the decision depended on specific life experience of each widow. One of the crucial factors was whether a widow was entitled to managing the farmstead of her late husband and also the number and age of children in the family. Young widows under 35 remarried in 88% of the cases, which was only natural since they did not have enough time to fulfil their maternal needs -62% of women under 35 had either no child or only one when they became widowed. By contrast, the majority of older widows (61% of widows aged 35-50) decided to manage the farm by themselves, since by entering into a new marriage they would compromise the inheritance shares of their existing children.
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